Review: John and Joe Bishop: Life After Deaf – a powerful journey into the deaf community

In John and Joe Bishop: Life After Deaf, we follow comedian John Bishop’s son Joe, who is deafened, on a journey towards his deaf identity, meeting deaf people for the first time and discovering BSL.

It’s a story that is familiar to those of us in the deaf community, but is often hidden from mainstream eyes.

That’s why this documentary, which screened at prime time on ITV1, is so important, and should be required viewing for anyone with a deaf child or relative.

Things felt different from the moment the programme started. The pre-show introduction was signed. The subtitles were burnt into the screen. This was going to be TV with a deaf perspective.

Joe lost roughly 60% of his hearing due to an auto-immune illness at the age of 15. He explained how this is often invisible to people, saying that unless he shaved his head “so you can see my hearing aids, you’re never going to know really.”

He explains how he woke up scared, wondering if this is ‘forever now?’ John says that there’s “not a single day where I wouldn’t swap places.”

The idea is for John to do a comedy gig in BSL, and Joe has agreed to start learning BSL for the first time with him.

But this journey becomes much more than simply learning how to sign – it gives Joe, mother Melanie and father John the chance to address the past while finding a new understanding of Joe’s deafness, and their relationships with each other.

It’s clear that that much has been left unspoken, despite heated arguments with John during Joe’s teenage years.

John talks of how he keeps “making mistakes”, something that wasn’t helped by his career taking off just as Joe lost his hearing, and spending a lot of time away on tour. They’ve never sat down and talked about Joe’s deafness and now Joe doesn’t see the point.

Joe’s mother Melanie had to deal with things at home, and she explains how thoughts and fears were displayed in shouting and anger for a long time.

What’s never happened, up to now, is the family being exposed to any sense of Joe’s deafness other than it being a negative that ideally would be fixed, or disappear.

This starts to change when Joe and John attend their first sign language class, with BSL teacher Bob Rose, a warm, patient and engaging presence throughout the film. Soon Joe is correcting John’s mistakes and both are struggling to learn how to use facial expressions as they sign.

Just this one encounter shifts the narrative. John says that “it’s nice to be in an environment where being deaf or hard of hearing wasn’t seen as a negative. I wish somebody had sat us down when he was 16 and told us that.” The lessons continue on Zoom when John goes on tour.

Soon, Joe is going to his first deaf pub meet-up, meeting a group of deaf footballers and making himself understood well enough to be invited to join them at training – where he gets used to playing without his deafness being a disadvantage.

At a visit to Heathlands School, John meets Oliver, a teacher who, like Joe, lost his hearing as a child. Oliver tells him how things changed when he met people like himself in the deaf community, gaining confidence. John admits that his approach to Joe’s deafness was how he could fix it, but Oliver replies that you can “talk about fixing something or make somebody happy as they can be, proud of themselves.”

Conversations like this one can be seen as reflecting the documentary as a whole, taking us from a medical model perspective, to a social model view. That it’s not the deafness itself that needs to be fixed, but the society and culture surrounding it. Joe soon talks about “realising I’m fine.”

The gig approaches. Meeting deaf comedian Gavin Lilley, John realises that his jokes just won’t translate for a deaf audience and Gavin identifies where the humour might come from – John’s real-life experiences of meeting deaf people on this journey. Gavin also explains how deaf humour is visual and physical.

I wondered how much of a car crash John’s gig might eventually be – but the clip we were shown showed how he did manage to (just about!) convey his humour to a deaf audience, albeit with rudimentary signs, using a method where he followed his own pre-recorded voiceover.

We see Joe and Melanie laughing hilariously at the gig, and as it ends, John concludes that this was the “most important stage I’ve ever walked off.”

In a brilliant move, the whole show was shown on ITV later in the evening, offering a valuable mainstream platform to deaf comedians Gavin Lilley, Ace Mahbaz, Leah Francisco and John Smith, plus hearing comedian Ray Bradshaw whose parents are deaf. Let’s hope this leads to more deaf comedy shows attended by deaf and non-deaf people alike.

It’s the faces that stuck with me, after watching this. The hurt in each of Joe, Melanie and John’s eyes, turned to smiles and laughter, and hope of a brighter future, at the end.

Of course, this is only the start of Joe’s (and his parents’) journey, and I’d love to see an update in a year or two about what happens next.

It’s revealed as the credits roll that Joe and John passed their BSL exams, and that Melanie is now learning to sign as well, so it looks like the future is bright.

This documentary has clearly had a huge effect on the Bishop family, but its true power will be on the audience watching at home, who will have seen for themselves that there’s more than one way of seeing deafness, and there’s a community out there just waiting to be embraced.

Watch this documentary on ITV Hub here (there is also a signed version here) and watch the BSL comedy show (in BSL, subtitles now also available and soon to be burnt in) by clicking here.

By Charlie Swinbourne, Editor